If a client wanted you to do this - how much would be fair?

Just as a ballpark, I recently quoted 70k, thats Aussie Dollars for 3 month project shooting on a 500 and included Intro and Outro, equipment hire, shooting, editing, seperate sound edit and master DVD outs.
 
Well, I wasn't exactly naming a "friend" who practices family law or is a paralegal or some schmuck who watched LA Law in 1984 when Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey looked a lot better. My associate is Senior Legal Counsel for a major studio and is therefore familiar specifically with entertainment law. He is relavent to this conversation and would have better advice than almost any of us could offer.

My advice is from the perspective of a business owner who has made his share of mistakes and now has best practices installed which protect my interests. Nothing is bulletproof, but an express written agreement goes a long way toward that benchmark. Deposits and signatures to bind service, explicit language about ownership, payment terms, credits, collective bargaining / labor practices and on and on are all included.

Again, this is all completely OT from the OP's question. Though it should be (and has been over and over on DVXUser) discussed and implemented by anyone who wants to be successful and remain in this industry for a good while.

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Erik Olson said:
This is a dreamy-eyed interpretation of copyright law that would rarely (if ever) stand up in a legal dispute. I would love to review any case that backs up your assertion that someone being paid to create something for a third party has explicit legal ownership of same. In commissioning a work for fair consideration, you are legally transferring ownership of same. It is, if not expressly communicated in a written agreement, at least implied in the spirit of the agreement.

...
That said, one of my partners is Senior Legal Counsel for one of the studios. I'd be glad to ask him his interpretation and comment here.

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It's not at all dreamy eyed - being paid a professional fee does not make you an employee. Your plumber is not your employee simply because you pay him to come in and fix your pipes and I'm sure your attorney would vigously deny an employer/employee relationship exists between you when he's advising you on a contract. Absent an employer/employee relationship, the copyright to any copyrightable work belongs to its actual creator. An independent contractor is not an employee.

I would be interested in his commentary also ... but make sure he understands we're talking about an independent producer who is not a regular employee of the client and has been contracted to be the creator of the work in question in exchange for a fixed fee. We're not talking about an employee of the studio creating a work in the course of his employment. That's why most of the contracts for producers, directors, and other above-the-line creatives would normally contain a paragraph explicitly defining that the work they produce is a work-for-hire.

In a similar thread running right now on DVINFO, an actual IP attorney has just written in the case of a student who produced a video for his school using his own equipment "Absent an agreement to the contrary, as long as the OP isn't an employee, and as long as the OP hasn't signed anything providing that IP created by him belongs to the school, it really doesn't matter whether he uses school equipment or not. Of course, the school can decide they don't want him using it for outside commercial purposes. However, the copyright in the work will still reside with the OP." This is virtually the same thing as being asked by a client to produce a video on their behalf. Wedding photographers retain the copyright on the photographs they make even though they have been paid to make them by the client.

Also in a related industry, still photography, look up the discussion on ownership of the rights to photographs taken by a freelance/contract photographer in the "ASMP Guide to Business Practices In Photgraphy" - Vogue may hire a photographer to shoot an editorial piece, paying all the expenses, model fees, travel, the photographers day rate, lab and processing, etc but the PHOTOGRAPHER, not Vogue Magazine, is the owner the copyright to the images because he is the creator of the copyrightable work and he is not an employee of Vogue Magazine. What Vogue gets for all their investment is a right of first refusal and a license to the exclusive use of the images they select from the take for a specified period of time.
 
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